Army trucks ferried the last residents evicted from Porta Farm township to rural areas on Wednesday, despite government pledges it had ended its demolition campaign that has left up to 700 000 people without homes or livelihoods.
A United Nations report called the campaign a clear violation of international law and demanded that Zimbabwe end it. However, state media quoted President Robert Mugabe as saying China would use its veto power in the UN Security Council to protect Zimbabwe from any UN censure.
”I know, of course, China will never allow that nonsense to happen,” Mugabe was quoted as saying in the state-owned Herald newspaper.
The United States and Britain on Tuesday demanded a Security Council briefing on a UN report condemning Zimbabwe’s mass demolitions of townships, but China has voiced objections to the possible meeting.
Mugabe was in Beijing this week for talks with Chinese officials, including President Hu Jintao. Under fire in the West for Zimbabwe’s dismal human rights record, Mugabe has turned to China and other Asian governments for political and economic support.
Police armed with batons and riot shields prevented aid workers or residents on Wednesday from entering the Porta Farm township, where earth-movers were seen at work where houses, prefabricated cabins and shacks had been demolished.
The government opened the township in 1991, moving in thousands of people from squatter camps in Harare so that Britain’s Queen Elizabeth would not see them during her visit. Since then the site has become home to more than 30 000 inhabitants.
”There is almost nobody there now. They are not allowing anybody to go in there,” one witness said, asking not to be identified for fear of reprisal.
”They are just waiting to pick up everybody who was there, with army trucks taking out people to rural areas.”
Demolitions of huts built by former farmworkers were also reportedly continuing on the outskirts of Chipinge, a town 600km southeast of the capital. The workers were among 500 000 employees of white farmers whose farms were seized under the government’s controversial land reform programme.
Mugabe alleges the country’s current economic and food crisis, with up to four million people needing urgent famine relief, is a result of Western boycotts and sanctions imposed in revenge for redistribution of whites’ land to black Zimbabweans.
The United States and the European Union have imposed targeted sanctions on Mugabe and his ruling elite, demanding that the government restore the rule of law.
In Beijing, Mugabe told Zimbabwe’s state media that UN Envoy Anna Tibaijuka, sent by Secretary General Kofi Annan to investigate the demolition and eviction campaign, had told him she was forced by the British to deliver a negative report.
Annan has indicated willingness to visit Zimbabwe for talks with Mugabe on Tibaijuka’s report, but reports from New York on Wednesday said ending all demolitions was a strict precondition.
Local Government Minister Ignatius Chombo the Porta Farm clearance is necessary because the site was earmarked for a sewage plant, and current water supplies there were contaminated. – Sapa-AP